January 8, 2011

Ha, remember the giant artwork I posted about a little while back? I got the scoop! Apparently, Mario Sarmiento Merchan, owner of a clothing design studio, decided to go for the Guinness World record for largest dress ever made. It took 21 square meters of fabric, 20 people, and 3 weeks to drape the 21-meter high garment over one hundred 6-meter long tubes of galvanized steel. The workers climbed up an internal staircase within the cylindrical structure in order to shape the dress.The artwork is titled “Fantasia” and represents the apocalypse, illustrated through artwork in two parts, on the front and the back of the dress. The front of the dress is decorated with illustrations of large native flowers, visible from a distance of 200 meters, painted by Cuencano artists Cristina Quinde and Edgar Leon. The back and train of the dress are covered with a painting of an erupting volcano. The refuse at the foot of the dress symbolizes the devastation of the world. Mystery solved. One question remains--what’s the connection between the construction of the world’s largest dress and the apocalypse? I still say hmmm...